Module 2_Week 2_Culture, Spatial Interaction, and Behavior_Human Geography

Module 2

Culture, Spatial Interaction, and Behavior

A. Components of Culture

Culture is transmitted within a society to succeeding generations by imitation,

instruction, suggestion, and example. In short, while the capacity for culture is biological,

culture itself is learned. As members of a social group, individuals acquire integrated sets

of behavioral patterns, environmental and social perceptions, and knowledge of existing

technologies. Of necessity, each of us learns the culture in which we are born and reared.

But we need not—indeed, cannot—learn its totality. Age, sex, status, or occupation may

dictate aspects of the cultural whole to which an individual is more or less likely to be

exposed, and which it is more or less appropriate for an individual to internalize.

A culture, that is, despite overall generalized and identifying characteristics and

even an outward appearance of uniformity, displays a social structure—a framework of

roles and interrelationships of individuals and established groups. Each individual learns

and is expected to adhere to the rules and conventions not only of the culture as a whole,

but also of those specific to the subculture to which he or she belongs. And that subgroup

may have its own recognized social structure (Figure 2.2). Think back to the different

subgroups and aspects of your own national culture that you became part of (and left) as

you progressed from childhood through high school and on to college-age adulthood and,

perhaps, to first employment.

Many different cultures, then, can coexist within a given area, each with its own

influence on the thoughts and behaviors of their separate members. Subcultures are

groups that can be distinguished from the wider society by their cultural patterns. Within

the United States, for example, we can readily recognize a variety of subcultures within

the larger “American” culture: white, black, Hispanic, Asian American, or other ethnic

groups; gay and straight; urban and rural; and many others (see the feature “The Burning

Man Festival of Art and Music: Subcultural Landscape in the Great Basin Desert”).

Human geography increasingly recognizes the pluralism of cultures within regions. In

addition to examining the separate content and influence of those subcultures, it attempts

to record and analyze the varieties of contested cultural interactions among them,

including those of a political and economic nature.

Out of the richness and intricacy of human life, we seek to isolate for special

study those more fundamental cultural variables that give structure and spatial order to

societies. We begin with culture traits, the smallest distinctive units of culture. Culture

traits range from the language spoken to the tools used or the games played. A trait may

be an object (a fishhook, for example), a technique (weaving and knotting of a fishnet), or

a belief (in the spirits resident in water bodies). Traits are the most elementary expression

of culture, the building blocks of the complex behavioral patterns of distinctive groups of

peoples. Of course, the same trait—the Christian religion, perhaps, or the Spanish

language—may be part of more than one culture. Similarly, traits are sometimes clearly

distinct, as in two completely different rules about the appropriateness of marrying first

cousins, or somewhat overlapping, as in preferences for one or the other of two styles of

rap music that share many common aspects.

But our discussion should not imply that culture traits exist in isolation—they are

always interrelated. Individual cultural traits that are functionally interrelated comprise a

culture complex. The existence of such complexes is universal. Keeping cattle was a

culture trait of the Masai of Kenya and Tanzania. Related traits included the measurement

of personal wealth by the number of cattle owned, a diet containing the milk and blood of

cattle, and disdain for labor unrelated to herding. The assemblage of these and other

related traits yielded a culture complex descriptive of one aspect of Masai society (Figure

2.3). In exactly the same way, religious complexes, business behavior complexes, sports

complexes, and others can easily be recognized in any society.

A cultural system is a broader generalization than a culture complex and refers to

the collection of interacting culture traits and complexes that are shared by a group within

a particular territory. Multiethnic societies, perhaps further subdivided by linguistic

differences, varied food preferences, and a host of other internal differentiations, may

nonetheless share enough joint characteristics to be recognizably distinctive cultural

systems to themselves and others. Certainly, citizens of the “melting pot” United States

would identify themselves as Americans, together constituting a unique culture system on

the world scene.

Culture traits, complexes, and systems have a real extent. When they are plotted

on maps, the regional character of the components of culture is revealed. Although

human geographers are interested in the spatial distribution of these individual elements

of culture, their usual concern is with a type of thematic region known as the culture

region, a portion of the Earth’s surface occupied by populations sharing recognizable and

distinctive cultural characteristics. Examples include the political organizations societies

devise, the religions they espouse, the form of economy they pursue, and even the type of

clothing they wear, eating utensils they use, or kind of housing they occupy. There are as

many such conceptual culture regions as there are culture traits and complexes

recognized for population groups. Their recognition will be particularly important in the

discussions of ethnic, folk, and popular culture that will occur in later chapters of this

book. In those later reviews, as within the present chapter, we must keep in mind that

within any single recognized culture region, groups united by the specific mapped

characteristics may be competing and distinctive in other important culture traits.

Indeed, the current validity of distinctive culture realms has been questioned in

light of an assumed globalization of all aspects of human society and economy. The

result of that globalization, it has been suggested, is a homogenization of cultures as

economies are integrated and uniform consumer demands are satisfied by standardized

commodities produced by international corporations. Certainly, the increasing mobility of

people, goods, and information has reduced the rigidly compartmentalized ethnicities,

languages, and religions of earlier periods. Cultural flows and exchanges have increased

over the recent decades, and with them has come a growing worldwide intermixture of

peoples and customs. Despite that growing globalism in all facets of life and economy,

however, the world is far from homogenized. Although an increased sameness of

commodities and experiences is encountered in distant places, even common and

standardized items of everyday life—branded soft drinks, for example, or American fast-

food franchises—take on unique regional meanings and roles, conditioned by the total

cultural mix they enter. Those multiple regional cultural mixes are often defiantly

distinctive and separatist as recurring incidents of ethnic conflict, civil war, and strident

regionalism attest. Rather than successfully leveling and removing all regional contrasts,

as frequently predicted, globalization continues to be countered by powerful forces of

regionalism, place identity, and ethnicity.

If a global culture can be discerned, it may best be seen as a combination of

multiple territorial cultures rather than a standardized uniformity. It is those territorially

different cultural mixtures that are recognized by the culture realms suggested on Figure

2.4, which is only one of many such possible divisions. The spatial pattern and

characteristics of these generalized realms will help us place the discussions and

examples of human geography of later chapters in their regional contexts. They are

commonly employed in courses on world regional geography.

B. Interaction of People and Environment

Culture develops in a physical environment that, in its way, contributes to

differences among people. In premodern subsistence societies, the acquisition of food,

shelter, and clothing, all parts of culture, depends on the utilization of the natural

resources at hand. The interrelations of people to the environment of a given area, their

perceptions and utilization of it, and their impact on it are interwoven themes of cultural

ecology—the study of the relationship between a culture group and the natural

environment that it occupies.

Cultural ecologists see evidence that subsistence pastoralists, hunter-gatherers,

and gardeners adapted their productive activities—and, by extension, their social

organizations and relationships—to the specific physical limitations of their different

local habitats. Presumably, similar natural environmental conditions influenced the

development of similar adaptive responses and cultural outcomes in separate,

unconnected locales. That initial influence, of course, does not predetermine the details of

the subsequent culture.

Geographers have long focused on the role of the physical environment in shaping

human culture. However, most geographers today dismiss as intellectually limiting and

demonstrably invalid extreme versions of environmental determinism, the belief that the

physical environment exclusively shapes humans and their cultures. Environmental

factors alone cannot account for the cultural variations that occur around the world.

Levels of technology, systems of organization, and ideas about what is true and right are

not dictated by environmental circumstances.

Possibilism is the viewpoint better the original way, as it is now Vidal de la

Blache. He argued that the natural environment constrains or limits culture, making some

cultural variants more or less possible than others, but it does not strictly determine

culture. The needs, traditions, and level of technology of a culture affect how that culture

assesses the possibilities of an area and shape what choices the culture makes regarding

them. Each society uses natural resources in accordance with its circumstances. Changes

in a group’s technical abilities or objectives bring about changes in its perceptions of the

usefulness of the land. Possibilism is thus a form of environment-culture interactionism.

Unlike some social scientists, however, geographers generally do not accept the

extreme opposite of environmental determinism—cultural autonomy—that cultures are

equally likely to develop any particular set of cultural traits no matter what the

environmental circumstances. For example, evidence suggests the nature of some

environmental limitations on the use of land area. The vast majority of the world’s

population is differentially concentrated on less than one-half of the Earth’s land surface,

as Figure 4.21 indicates. Areas with relatively mild climates and flat topographies that

offer a supply of fresh water, fertile soil, and abundant mineral resources are densely

settled, reflecting in part the different potentials of the land under earlier technologies to

support population. Even today, the polar regions, high and rugged mountains, deserts,

and some hot and humid lowland areas contain very few people. If resources for feeding,

clothing, or housing ourselves within an area are lacking, or if we do not recognize them

there, there is no inducement for people to occupy a territory.

People are also able to modify their environment, and this is the other half of the

human-environment relationship of geographic concern. Geography, including cultural

geography, examines both the reactions of people to the physical environment and their

impact on that environment. By using our environment, we modify it—in part, through

the material objects we place on the landscape: cities, farms, roads, and so on (Figure

2.5). The form these take is the product of the kind of culture group in which we live. The

cultural landscape, the Earth’s surface as modified by human action, is the tangible

physical record of a given culture. House types, transportation networks, parks and

cemeteries, and the size and distribution of settlements are among the indicators of the

use that humans have made of the land.

Human actions, both deliberate and inadvertent, have modified or even destroyed

the environment for perhaps as long as humankind has existed. People have used, altered,

and replaced the vegetation in wide areas of the tropics and midlatitudes. They have

hunted to extinction vast herds and whole species of animals. They have, through overuse

and abuse of the Earth and its resources, rendered sterile and unpopulated formerly

productive and attractive regions. Fire has been called the first great tool of humans, and

the impact of its early and continuing use is found on nearly every continent. Poleward of

the great rain forests of equatorial South America, Africa, and South Asia lies the tropical

savanna of extensive grassy vegetation separating scattered trees and forest groves

(Figure 2.6). The trees appear to be the remnants of naturally occurring tropical dry

forests, thorn forests, and scrub now largely obliterated by the use, over many millennia,

of fire to remove the unwanted and unproductive trees and to clear off old grasses for

more nutritious new growth. The grasses supported the immense herds of grazing animals

that were the basis of hunting societies. After independence, the government of Kenya in

East Africa sought to protect its national game preserves by prohibiting the periodic use

of fire. It quickly found that the immense herds of gazelles, zebras, antelope, and other

grazers (and the lions and other predators that fed on them) that tourists came to see were

being replaced by less-appealing browsing species—rhinos, hippos, and elephants. With

fire prohibited, the forests began to reclaim their natural habitat and the grassland fauna

was replaced.

Examples of adverse human impact abound. The Pleistocene overkill—the Stone

Age loss of whole species of large animals on all inhabited continents—is often ascribed

to the unrestricted hunting to extinction carried on by societies familiar with fire who

drove animals and used hafted weapons (with handles) to slaughter them. With these

methods, according to one estimate, about 40 percent of African large-animal genera

passed to extinction. The majority of large mammal, reptile, and flightless bird species

had disappeared from Australia around 46,000 years ago; in North America, some two-

thirds of original large mammals had succumbed by 11,000 years ago under pressure

from the hunters migrating to and spreading across the continent. Although some have

suggested that climatic changes or pathogens carried by dogs, rats, and other camp

followers were at least partially responsible, human action is the more generally accepted

explanation for the abrupt faunal changes. No uncertainty exists in the record of faunal

destruction by the Maori of New Zealand or of Polynesians who had exterminated some

80 to 90 percent of South Pacific bird species—as many as 2,000 in all—by the time

Captain James Cook of Britain arrived in the 18th century. Similar destruction of key

marine species—Caribbean sea turtles, sea cows off the coast of Australia, sea otters near

Alaska, and others elsewhere—as early as 10,000 years ago resulted in environmental

damage whose effects continue to the present.

Earlier humans found the physical environment more immediate and controlling

than we do today. Some 11,000 years ago, the massive glaciers—moving ice sheets of

great depth—that had covered much of the land and water of the Northern Hemisphere

(Figure 2.8) began to retreat. Animal, plant, and human populations that had been

spatially confined by both the ice margin and the harsh climates of middle-latitude

regions began to spread, colonizing newly opened territories. The end of the Paleolithic

(Old Stone Age) is the period near the end of glaciation during which small and scattered

groups like the ivory hunters at this chapter’s start began to develop regional variations in

their ways of life and livelihood.

All were hunter-gatherers, preagricultural people dependent on the year-round

availability of plant and animal foodstuffs that they could secure with the rudimentary

stone tools and weapons at their disposal. Even during the height of the Ice Age, the

unglaciated sections of western, central, and northeastern Europe, which today are home

to productive farms, forests, and cities, were then covered with tundra vegetation, the

mosses, lichens, and low shrubs typical of areas too cold to support forests. Southeastern

Europe and southern Russia had forest, tundra, and steppe (grasslands), and the

Mediterranean areas, which today have shrub and scrub-oak vegetation, had forest cover.

While spreading, the total population also increased. But hunting and foraging

bands require considerable territory to support a relatively small number of individuals.

There were contacts between groups and, apparently, even planned gatherings for trade,

socializing, and selecting mates from outside the home group. Nevertheless, the bands

tended to live in isolation. Estimates place the Paleolithic population of the entire island

of Great Britain, which was on the northern margin of habitation, at only some 400–500

persons living in widely separated families of 20–40 people. Total world population at

about 9000 bce probably ranged from 5 to 10 million. Variations in the types of tools

characteristic of different population groups steadily increased as people migrated and

encountered new environmental problems.

C. Seeds of Change

The retreat of the last glaciers marked the end of the Paleolithic era and the

beginning of successive periods of cultural evolution, leading from basic hunting and

gathering economies at the outset through the development of agriculture and animal

husbandry to, ultimately, the urbanization and industrialization of modern societies and

economies. Because not all cultures passed through all stages at the same time, or even at

all, cultural divergence between human groups became evident. Glacial recession brought

new ecological conditions to which people had to adapt. The weather became warmer and

forests began to appear on the open plains and tundras of Europe and northern China. In

the Middle East, where much plant and animal domestication would later occur, savanna

(grassland) vegetation replaced more arid landscapes. Populations grew and, through

hunting, depleted the large herds of grazing animals already retiring northward with the

retreating glacial front.

The population of hunter-gatherers rose slowly at the end of the glacial period. As

rapid climatic fluctuation adversely affected their established plant and animal food

sources, people independently, in more than one world area, experimented with the

domestication of plants and animals. There is no agreement on whether the domestication

of animals preceded or followed that of plants. The sequence may well have been

different in different areas. What appears certain is that animal domestication—the

successful breeding of species to serve human needs—began during the Mesolithic, not

as a conscious economic effort by humans but as outgrowths of the keeping of small or

young wild animals as pets and the attraction of scavenger animals to the refuse of human

settlements. The assignment of religious significance to certain animals and the docility

of others to herding by hunters all strengthened the human-animal connections that

ultimately led to full domestication. Eventually, nearly everyone in the world would

come to obtain their food via agriculture rather than hunting and gathering (see

discussion of Innovation below). This had such dramatic effects on the way humans spent

their daily lives, as well as the way they interrelated with the natural environment, that it

is often referred to as the Agricultural Revolution.

Radiocarbon dates suggest the occurrence of the domestication of pigs in

southeastern Turkey and of goats in the Near East as early as 8000–8400 bce, of sheep in

Turkey by about 7500 bce, and of cattle and pigs in both Greece and the Near East about

7000 bce North Africa, India, and southeastern Asia were other Old World domestication

sources, as were—less successfully— Mesoamerica and the Andean Uplands. Although

there is evidence that the concept of animal domestication diffused from limited source

regions, once its advantages were learned, numerous additional domestications were

accomplished elsewhere. The widespread natural occurrence of species able to be

domesticated made that certain. Cattle of different varieties, for example, were

domesticated in India, north-central Eurasia, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Pigs and various

domestic fowl are other examples.

While adapting wild plant stock to agricultural purposes, the human cultivators,

too, adapted. They assumed sedentary residence to protect the planted areas from animal,

insect, and human predators. They developed labor specializations and created more

formalized and expansive religious structures in which fertility and harvest rites became

important elements. The regional contrasts between hunter-gatherer and sedentary

agricultural societies increased. Where the two groups came in contact, farmers were the

victors and hunter-gatherers the losers in the competition for territorial control. The

contest continued into modern times. During the past 500 years, European expansion

totally dominated the hunting and gathering cultures it encountered in large parts of the

world such as North America and Australia (see the feature “Is Geography Destiny?”).

Even today, in the rain forests of central Africa, Bantu farmers put continuing pressure on

hunting and gathering Pygmies, and in southern Africa, Hottentot herders and Bantu

farmers constantly advance on the territories of the San (Bushmen) hunter-gatherer

bands. The contrast and conflict between the hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists provide

dramatic evidence of cultural divergence.

The domestication of plants and animals began during the Mesolithic period, but

in its refined form it marked the onset of the Neolithic (New Stone Age). Like other

Stone Age levels, the Neolithic was more a stage of cultural development than a specific

span of time. The term implies the creation of an advanced set of tools and technologies

to deal with the conditions and needs encountered by an expanding, sedentary population

whose economy was based on the agricultural management of the environment.

Not all peoples in all areas of the Earth made the same cultural transition at the

same time. In the Near East, from which most of our knowledge of this late prehistoric

period comes, the Neolithic lasted from approximately 8000 to 3500 bce There, as

elsewhere, it brought complex and revolutionary changes in human life. Culture began to

alter at an accelerating pace, and change itself became a way of life. In an interconnected

adaptive web, technological and social innovations came with a speed and genius

surpassing all previous periods. Humans learned the arts of spinning and weaving plant

and animal fibers. They learned to use the potter’s wheel and to fire clay and make

utensils. They developed techniques of brick making, mortaring, and construction, and

they discovered the skills of mining, smelting, and casting metals. On the foundation of

such technical advancements, a more complex exploitative culture appeared and a more

formal economy emerged. A stratified society based on labor and role specialization

replaced the rough equality of adults in hunting and gathering economies (various forms

of sex-role division of labor largely continued, however). Special local advantages in

resources or products promoted the development of long-distance trading connections,

which the invention of the sailboat helped to maintain.

The social and technical revolutions that began in and characterized the Neolithic

period were initially spatially confined. The new technologies, the new ways of life, and

the new social structures diffused from those points of origin and were selectively

adopted by people who were not a party to their creation. The term culture hearth is used

to describe such centers of innovation and invention, from which clusters of key culture

traits and elements moved to exert an influence on surrounding regions. The hearth may

be viewed as the “cradle” of any culture group whose developed systems of livelihood

and life created a distinctive cultural landscape. Most of the hearths that evolved across

the world remained at low levels of social and technical development. Only a few

developed the trappings of civilizations. The definition of that term is not precise, but

indicators of its achievement are commonly assumed to be writing, metallurgy, long-

distance trade connections, astronomy and mathematics, social stratification and labor

specialization, formalized governmental systems, and a structured urban culture.

Several major culture hearths emerged in the Neolithic period. Prominent centers

of early creativity were found in Egypt, Crete, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley of the

Indian subcontinent, northern China, southeastern Asia, several locations in subSaharan

Africa, in the Americas, and elsewhere (Figure 2.15). They arose in widely separated

areas of the world, at different times, and under differing ecological circumstances. Each

displayed its own unique mix of culture traits.

Each culture hearth showed a rigorous organization of agriculture resulting in

local productivity sufficient to enable a significant number of people to engage in

nonfarm activities. Therefore, each hearth region saw the creation of a stratified society

that included artisans, warriors, merchants, scholars, priests, and administrators. Each

also developed or adopted astronomy, mathematics, and the all-essential calendar. Each,

while advancing in cultural diversity and complexity, exported technologies, skills, and

learned behaviors far beyond its own boundaries.

Writing appeared first in Mesopotamia and Egypt at least 5,000 years ago, as

cuneiform in the former and as hieroglyphics in the latter. The separate forms of writing

have suggested to some that they arose independently, in separate hearths. Others

maintain that the idea of writing originated in Mesopotamia and spread outward to Egypt,

to the Indus Valley, to Crete, and perhaps even to China, though independent

development of Chinese ideographic writing is usually assumed. The systems of record

keeping developed in New World hearths were not related to those of the Old, but once

created, they spread widely in areas under the influence of Andean and Mesoamerican

hearths. In Mesoamerica, distinctive Zapotec, Olmec, and Maya writing systems

apparently emerged between 2,600 and 2,300 years ago. Skill in working iron, so

important in Near Eastern kingdoms, was an export of sub-Saharan African hearths.

The anthropologist Julian Steward proposed the concept of multilinear evolution

to explain the common characteristics of widely separated cultures developed under

similar ecological circumstances. He suggested that each major environmental zone—

arid, high-altitude, midlatitude steppe, tropical forest, and so on—tends to induce

common adaptive traits in the cultures of those who exploit it. Those traits were, at base,

founded on the development of agriculture and the emergence of similar cultural and

administrative structures in the several culture hearths. But similar does not imply

identical. Steward simply suggested that because comparable sequences of developmental

events cannot always or even often be explained on the basis of borrowing or exporting

of ideas and techniques (because of time and space differences in the cultures sharing

them), they must be regarded as evidence of parallel creations based on similar ecologies.

From similar origins, but through separate adaptations and independent innovations,

distinctive cultures emerged.

D. The Structure of Culture

Understanding a culture fully is, perhaps, impossible for one who is not part of it

(and it is difficult for those inside it, as well). For analytical purposes, however, the traits

and complexes of culture—its building blocks and expressions—may be grouped and

examined as subsets of the whole. The anthropologist Leslie White suggested that for

analytical purposes, a culture could be viewed as a three-part structure composed of

subsystems that he termed ideological, technological, and sociological. Specific traits

within each subsystem of culture can be labeled mentifacts, artifacts, or sociofacts.

Together, according to these interpretations, the subsystems—identified by their separate

components—comprise the system of culture as a whole. But we emphasize that this

subdivision is for analytic purposes only; in reality, they are integrated, with each acting

on the others and, in turn, affected by them. The ideological subsystem consists of ideas,

beliefs, and knowledge of a culture and of the ways in which these things are expressed

in speech or other forms of communication. Mythologies and theologies, legend,

language, literature, philosophy, ethical systems, and folk wisdom make up this category.

The sociological subsystem of a culture is the sum of those expected and accepted

patterns of interpersonal relations and social rituals that find their outlet in economic,

political, military, religious, kinship and mating, and other associations. These sociofacts

define the social organization of a culture. They regulate how the individual functions

relative to the group— whether it be family, church, or state. There are no “givens” as far

as the patterns of interaction in any of these associations are concerned, except that most

cultures possess a variety of formal and informal ways of structuring behavior.

Classifications are necessarily arbitrary to some degree, and these classifications of the

subsystems and components of culture are no exception. The three-part categorization of

subsystems of culture, while helping us to appreciate its structure and complexity, can

simultaneously obscure the many-sided nature of individual elements of culture. A

dwelling, for example, is an artifact providing shelter for its occupants. It is,

simultaneously, a sociofact reflecting the nature of the family or kinship group it is

designed to house, and a mentifact summarizing a culture group’s convictions about

appropriate design and orientation of dwelling units. In the same vein, clothing serves as

an artifact of bodily protection appropriate to climatic conditions, available materials and

techniques, or the activity in which the wearer is engaged. But garments also may be

sociofacts, identifying an individual’s role in the social structure of the community or

culture, and mentifacts, evoking larger community value systems.

Nothing in a culture stands totally alone. Changes in the ideas that a society holds

may affect the sociological and technological systems just as changes in technology force

adjustments in the social system. The abrupt alteration of the ideological structure of

Russia following the 1917 communist revolution from a monarchical, agrarian system to

an industrialized, communistic society involved sudden, interrelated alteration of all

facets of that country’s culture system. The equally abrupt disintegration of Russian

communism in the early 1990s was similarly disruptive of all its established economic,

social, and administrative structures. The interlocking nature of all aspects of a culture is

termed cultural integration.

E. Culture Change

The recurring theme of cultural geography is change. No culture is, or has been,

characterized by a permanently fixed set of material objects, systems of organization, or

even ideologies. Admittedly, all of these may be long enduring within a stable, isolated

society at equilibrium with its resource base. Such isolation and stability have always

been rare. On the whole, while cultures are essentially conservative, they are always in a

state of flux. Some changes are major and pervasive. The transition from hunter-gatherer

to sedentary farmer, as we have seen, affected markedly every facet of the cultures

experiencing that change and the experiences of the people living in those cultures.

Profound, too, was the impact of the Industrial Revolution and its associated urbanization

on all the societies that it has touched.

Not all change is so extensive as that following the introduction of agriculture or

mechanized manufacturing. Many changes are so slight individually as to go almost

unnoticed at their inception, though cumulatively they may substantially alter the affected

culture. Think of how the culture of the United States differs today from what you know

it to have been in 1940—not in essentials, perhaps, but in the innumerable electrical,

digital, and transportational devices that have been introduced and in the social,

behavioral, and recreational changes they and other technological changes have wrought.

Among these latter have been shifts in employment patterns to include greater

participation by women in the waged workforce and associated adjustments in attitudes

toward the role of women in the society at large. Such cumulative changes occur because

the cultural traits of any group are not independent; they are clustered in a coherent and

integrated pattern. Change on a small scale can have wide repercussions as associated

traits accommodate to the adopted adjustment. Change, both major and minor, within

cultures is induced by innovation, diffusion, and acculturation.

Innovation implies changes to a culture that result from ideas created within the

social group itself and adopted by the culture. The novelty may be an invented

improvement in material technology, like the bow and arrow or the jet engine. It may

involve the development of nonmaterial forms of social structure and interaction:

feudalism, for example, or Christianity. It may be a new form of popular music or a new

way of styling hair. Many innovations are of little consequence by themselves, but

sometimes the widespread adoption of seemingly inconsequential innovations may bring

about large changes when viewed over a period of time. A new musical style such as hip-

hop “adopted” by a few people may spread to others and bring with it changes to

vernacular speech, clothing styles, dance styles, graffiti art, and other forms of

entertainment, which, in turn, may affect retailers’ advertising campaigns and consumers’

spending. Eventually, a new cultural form will be identified that may have an important

impact on the thinking processes of the adopters and on those who come into contact with

the adopters. Notice that a broad definition of innovation is used, but notice also that

what is important is whether or not innovations are accepted and adopted.

Innovation and invention—frequently under stressful conditions—have marked

the history of humankind. As we have seen, growing populations at the end of the Ice

Age necessitated an expanded food base. In response, domestication of plants and

animals appears to have occurred independently in more than one world area. Indeed, a

most striking fact about early agriculture is the near universality of its development or

adoption within a very short span of human history. In 10,000 bce, the world population

of no more than 10 million was nearly exclusively hunter-gatherers. By 1500 ce, only 1

percent of the world’s 350 million people still followed that way of life. Today, much

less than 1 percent of the world’s 7 billion people do. The revolution in food production

represented by the advent of agriculture affected every facet of the threefold subsystems

of culture of every society accepting it. All innovation has a radiating impact on the web

of culture; the more basic the innovation, the more pervasive its consequences.

Diffusion is the process by which an idea or innovation is transmitted from one

individual or group to another across space. Diffusion may assume a variety of forms,

each different in its impact on social groups. Basically, however, two processes are

involved: (1) People move, for any of a number of reasons, to a new area and take their

culture with them. For example, immigrants to the American colonies brought with them

crops and farming techniques, building styles, and concepts of government that were

alien to their new home. (2) Information about an innovation (e.g., hybrid corn or

compact discs) may spread throughout a society, perhaps aided by local or mass media

advertising; or new adopters of an ideology or way of life—for example, a new religious

creed—may be inspired or recruited by immigrant or native converts. The former is

known as relocation diffusion, the latter as expansion diffusion.

Expansion diffusion involves the spread of a culture trait from one place to others

when people who did not formerly practice the trait adopt it after direct or indirect

contact with those who do practice the trait. In the process, the thing diffused also

remains—and is frequently intensified—in the origin area. Islam, for example, expanded

from its Arabian Peninsula origin locale across much of Asia and North Africa. At the

same time, it strengthened its hold over its Near Eastern birthplace by displacing

practitioners of tribal, Christian, and Jewish religions. The term expansion refers to the

fact that this process of diffusion necessarily involves an increase in the number of people

or societies practicing the trait. Furthermore, as potential adopters become adopters and

serve to pass on the innovation to others, the number of contacts of adopters with

potential adopters will compound. Consequently, the innovation will spread slowly at

first and then more and more rapidly until saturation occurs or a barrier is reached.

In contrast to expansion diffusion, relocation diffusion occurs when the

innovation is carried to new areas by migrating individuals or populations that possess it

(Figure 2.21a); in Chapter 3, we learn that migration is also known by geographers as

residential relocation. Mentifacts, sociofacts, or artifacts are therefore introduced into

new locales by new settlers who become part of populations not themselves associated or

in contact with the origin area of the innovation. The spread of religions by settlers or

conquerors is a clear example of relocation diffusion, as was the diffusion of agriculture

to Europe from the Middle East (Figure 2.13). Christian Europeans brought their faiths to

areas of colonization or economic penetration throughout the world. At the world scale,

massive relocation diffusion resulted from the European colonization and economic

penetration that began in the 16th century. More localized relocation diffusion continues

today as Asian refugees or foreign “guest workers” bring their cultural traits to their new

areas of settlement in Europe or North America. Like expansion diffusion, relocation

diffusion spreads cultural traits across the landscape, but unlike it, relocation diffusion

does not entail an increase in the number of people or societies practicing the trait. Also,

because migration often reflects patterns of distance decay, wherein people move over

short distances, or it reflects patterns of long-distance relocation over transportation

networks like highways or airline routes, relocation diffusion can also be characterized as

reflecting patterns of contagious or hierarchical diffusion.

It is not always possible, of course, to determine the precise point of origin or the

routes of diffusion of innovations now widely adopted (see the feature “Documenting

Diffusion”). Nor is it always certain whether the existence of a cultural trait in two

different areas is the result of diffusion or of independent (or parallel) invention. Cultural

similarities do not necessarily prove that diffusion has occurred. The pyramids of Egypt

and of the Central American Maya civilization most likely were separately conceived and

are not necessarily evidence, as some have proposed, of pre-Columbian voyages from the

Mediterranean to the Americas (or of visits by aliens from outer space, as has also been

suggested). A Neolithic monument-building culture, after all, has only a limited number

of shapes from which to choose.

A culture group may undergo major modifications in its own identifying traits by

adopting some or all of the characteristics of another, dominant culture group. Such is the

case in acculturation—discussed at greater length in Chapter 6 (Section 6.3)—as

immigrant populations take on the values, attitudes, customs, and speech of the receiving

society, which itself undergoes change from absorption of the arriving group. A different

form of contact and subsequent cultural alteration may occur in a conquered or colonized

region where the subordinate or subject population is either forced to adopt the culture of

the new ruling group, introduced through relocation diffusion, or does so voluntarily,

overwhelmed by the superiority in numbers or the technical level of the conqueror. Tribal

Europeans in areas of Roman conquest, native populations in the wake of Slavic

occupation of Siberia, and Native Americans stripped of their lands following European

settlement of North America experienced this kind of cultural modification or adoption.

Virtually all cultures are amalgams of innumerable innovations spread spatially

from their points of origin and integrated into the structure of the receiving societies. It

has been estimated that no more than 10 percent of the cultural items of any society are

traceable to innovations created by its members and that the other 90 percent come to the

society through diffusion (see the feature “A Homemade Culture”). Because, as we have

seen, the pace of innovation is affected strongly by the mixing of ideas among alert,

responsive people and is increased by exposure to a variety of cultures, the most active

and innovative historical hearths of culture were those at crossroad locations and those

deeply involved in distant trade and colonization. Ancient Mesopotamia and classical

Greece and Rome had such locations and involvements, as did the West African culture

hearth after the 5th century and, much later, England during the Industrial Revolution and

the spread of the British Empire.

Political restrictions, religious taboos, and other social customs are cultural

barriers to diffusion. The French Canadians, although close geographically to many

Anglo-Canadian centers of diffusion such as Ottawa and Toronto, strive to be only

minimally influenced by them. Both their language and culture complex govern their

selective acceptance of Anglo influences, and restrictive French-only language

regulations are enforced to preserve the integrity of their distinctive French culture. In a

more extreme fashion, the Afghan Taliban and other Mideast fundamentalist groups

adamantly or violently reject Western sociocultural values, seeking to preserve their

religious and cultural purity through isolation from secular, non-Islamic influences.

Traditional groups, perhaps controlled by firm religious conviction, may largely reject

culture traits and technologies of the larger society in whose midst they live.

Adopting cultures do not usually accept items intact that originate outside the

receiving society. Diffused ideas and artifacts commonly undergo some alteration of

meaning or form that makes them acceptable to a borrowing group. The process of the

fusion of the old and new is called syncretism and is a major feature of culture change. It

can be seen in alterations to religious ritual and dogma made by convert societies seeking

acceptable conformity between old and new beliefs. For example, enslaved people

brought voodoo from West Africa to the Americas where it thrived in Haiti and

Louisiana. Over the years, it absorbed influences from French and Spanish Catholicism,

American Indian spiritual practices, and even Masonic tradition. Despite those adaptive

mixings, many believers consider themselves to be Catholics and see no contradiction

between Christianity and their faith in protective spirits and other tenets of voodoo. On a

more familiar level, syncretism is reflected in subtle or blatant alterations of imported

cuisines to make them conform to the demands of the American palate and fast-food

franchises.

F. Bases for Interaction

Neither the world’s resources nor products are uniformly distributed. Commodity

flows are responses to these differences; they are links between points of supply and

locales of demand. Such response may not be immediate, or even direct. Factors such as

the awareness of supplies or markets, the presence or absence of transportation

connections, costs of movement, and the ability to pay for things wanted and needed—all

that and more affect the structure of commodity exchange. Underlying these, however, is

a basic set of controlling principles governing spatial interaction.

Geographer Edward Ullman (1912–1976) speculated on the essential conditions

affecting such interactions and proposed an explanatory model. He observed that spatial

interaction is effectively controlled by three flow-determining factors that he called

complementarity, transferability, and intervening opportunity. Although Ullman’s model

deals with commodity flows, it has—as we shall see—applicability to information

transfers and human movements as well.

For two places to interact, one place must have what another place wants and can

secure. That is, one place must have a supply of an item for which there is an effective

demand in the other, as evidenced by desire for the item, purchasing power to acquire it,

and means to transport it. The word describing this circumstance is complementarity.

Effective supply and demand are important considerations; mere differences from place

to place in commodity surplus or deficit are not enough to initiate exchange. For

example, Greenland and the Amazon basin are notably unlike in their natural resources

and economies, but their amount of interaction is minimal. Supply and market must come

together, as they do in the flow of seasonal fruits and vegetables from California’s

Imperial Valley to the urban markets of the American Midwest and East or in the

movement of manganese from Ukraine to the steel mills of Western Europe. The massive

movement of crude and refined petroleum clearly demonstrates complementarity in

international trade (Figure 3.2). More generalized patterns of complementarity underlie

the exchanges of the raw materials and agricultural goods of less developed countries for

the money or industrial commodities of the developed states.

Even when complementarity exists, spatial interaction occurs only when

conditions of transferability—acceptable costs of an exchange—are met. Spatial

movement responds not just to availability and demand but to considerations of time and

cost. Transferability is an expression of the mobility of a commodity and is a function of

three interrelated conditions: (1) the characteristics and value of the product; (2) the

distance, measured in time and money penalties, over which it must be moved; and (3)

the ability of the commodity to bear the costs of movement. If the time and money costs

of traversing a distance are too great, exchange does not occur. That is, mobility is not

just a physical matter but an economic one as well. If a given commodity is not

affordable upon delivery to an otherwise willing buyer, it will not move in trade, and the

potential buyer must seek a substitute or go without.

Complementarity can be effective only in the absence of more attractive

alternative sources of supply or demand closer at hand or cheaper. Intervening

opportunities serve to reduce supply/demand interactions that otherwise might develop

between distant complementary areas. A supply of Saharan sand is not enough to assure

its flow to sand-deficient Manhattan because supplies of sand are more easily and

cheaply available within the New York metropolitan region. For reasons of cost and

convenience, a purchaser is unlikely to buy identical commodities at a distance when a

suitable nearby supply is available. When it is, the intervening opportunity demonstrates

complementarity at a shorter distance.

Complementarity, transferability, and intervening opportunity— the controlling

conditions of commodity movement—help us understand all forms of spatial interaction,

including choosing a restaurant, where to go to college, or where to buy a house—even

the once-in-a-lifetime transcontinental adventure of the Hauns. The study of unique

spatial interactions, such as the discovery of an Inuit carving in a Miami gift shop, is

interesting but does not establish general patterns. In this chapter, we focus on general

principles that govern the frequency and intensity of interaction both to validate the three

preconditions of spatial exchange and to establish the probability that any given potential

interaction will actually occur. Our interest is similar to that of the physical scientist

investigating, for example, the response of a gas to variations in temperature and

pressure. The concern there is with all of the gas molecules and the probability of their

collective reactions; the action of any particular molecule is of little interest. Similarly,

we are mostly concerned here with the probability of aggregate, not individual

(disaggregate), behavior.

In all manner of ways, the lives and activities of people everywhere are influenced

by the friction of distance. That phrase reminds us that distance has a retarding effect on

human interaction because there are increasing penalties in time and cost associated with

longer-distance, more expensive interchanges. We visit nearby friends more often than

distant friends; we go more frequently to the neighborhood convenience store cluster than

to the farther regional shopping center. Telephone calls or mail deliveries between nearby

towns are greater in volume than those to more distant locations. An informal study

showed that college students living in dormitories near the cafeteria are more likely to use

the cafeteria; students living farther away do not visit the cafeteria as often (we assume

that students who dislike cafeteria food do not choose to live in more distant

dormitories!).

Carey’s second observation—that large cities have greater drawing power for

individuals than do small ones—was subsequently addressed by the law of retail

gravitation, proposed by William J. Reilly (1899–1970) in 1931. Using the population

and distance inputs of the gravity model, Reilly determined the breaking-point (BP)

location between two towns where one would expect to find the boundary separating the

market areas of the two towns. The market areas are functional regions for each town that

enclose the area where each town exerts controlling influence over retail trade; beyond

that boundary, the other town dominates.

The spatial interaction models of distance decay and gravitational pull we have

considered thus far deal with only two places at a time. The world of reality is rather

more complex. All cities, not just city pairs, within a regional system of cities have the

possibility of interacting with one another. Indeed, the more specialized the goods

produced in each separate center—that is, the greater their collective complementarity—

the more likely it is that such multiple interactions will occur. Similarly, shoppers often

have more than two stores or shopping centers to choose from on any given shopping

trip. A potential model, also based on the principles of social gravity, provides an

estimate of the interaction opportunities available to a center in such a multicentered

network. It tells us the relative interaction pull of each point in relation to all other places

within a region. It does so by summing the interaction attractiveness and distance

relationships between all points of potential interaction within an area. The concept of

potential is applicable whenever the measurement of the intensity of spatial interaction is

of concern—as it is in studies of retail behavior, marketing, land values, broadcasting,

commuting patterns, and the like.

Distance decay and the gravity models help us understand the bases for

interaction in an idealized area without natural or cultural barriers to movement or

restrictions on routes followed, and in which only rational interaction decisions are made.

Even under those model conditions, the pattern of spatial interaction that develops for

whatever reason inevitably affects the conditions under which future interactions will

occur. An initial structure of centers and connecting flows will tend to freeze into the

landscape a mutually reinforcing continuation of that same pattern. The predictable flows

of shoppers to existing shopping centers make those centers attractive to other merchants.

New store openings increase customer flow; increased flow strengthens the developed

pattern of spatial interaction. And increased road traffic calls for the highway

improvement that encourages additional traffic volume.

Such directional biases are in part a reflection of network bias, a shorthand way of

saying that the presence or absence of connecting channels strongly affects the likelihood

that spatial interaction, including transportation and communication, will occur. A set of

routes and the places that they connect are collectively called a network; in abstract

terms, the places are called nodes and the connecting routes are called links. Networks

facilitate spatial interaction along their links and between nodes they directly connect.

Flows cannot occur between all nodes if not all nodes are linked, at least indirectly. In

Figure 3.6a, the interchange between A and X, though not necessarily impossible, is

unlikely because the route between them is indirect and circuitous. In information flows,

a worker on the assembly line is less likely to know of company production plans than is

a secretary in the executive offices; these two workers are tied into quite different

information networks.

G. Human Spatial Behavior

Humans are not commodities and individually do not necessarily respond

predictably to the impersonal dictates of spatial interaction constraints. Yet, to survive,

people must be mobile and collectively do react to distance, time, and cost considerations

of movement in space and to the implications of complementarity, transferability, and

intervening opportunity. Indeed, an exciting line of geographic inquiry involves how

individuals make spatial behavioral decisions and how those separate decisions may be

summarized by models and generalizations to explain collective actions. These

geographers approach geographic problems of human spatial behavior at the individual or

disaggregate level. Geographers taking this behavioral approach believe they can

improve models of spatial behavior such as those based on social gravity or economic

rationality (see Chapter 10) by learning more about the way people actually make

decisions about where and how to travel and perform other geographic acts.

They also recognize that problems involving the psychology of place, space, and

environment are geographic problems in their own right because geographers study all

aspects of space, place, and environment. As such, behavioral geographers appreciate that

the spatial behaviors of individual people depend, in part, on what people believe to be

true about themselves and the world, and how people actually remember and reason

about properties of themselves and the world—their cognition. They further appreciate

that humans do not make decisions only rationally or consciously; many decisions result

from nonconscious mental activities and are influenced by emotions and attitudes.

Finally, an individual analysis of human geography reminds us that no two people are

exactly the same; whether based on age, culture, gender, genetic heritage, social class,

training, or some other aspect of personal background or experience, people may differ

somewhat in their geographic behavior. Models that treat all people as identical are

oversimplifications, according to this approach.

Mobility is the general term applied to all types of human movement through

space and time. Two aspects of that mobility behavior concern us. The first is the daily or

temporary use of space—the journeys to stores, to work, or to school, or for longer

periods on vacation or visiting friends and relatives. These types of mobility are often

designated as temporary travel and have no suggestion of relocation of residence (Figure

3.8); people intend to return home after such trips, if not the same day, then relatively

soon thereafter. The second type of mobility is the longer-term commitment related to

decisions to leave the home territory permanently and find residence in a new location

(residential relocation).

This second form of spatial behavior is termed migration. The distinction between

temporary travel and migration is important to a geographic analysis of spatial mobility

and is usually fairly clear, but there are ambiguous cases. College students “migrate” to

their campus housing from home but may return to that home every summer and after

they graduate. Seasonal farm workers may be away from their home for much of the

year, following the ripening fruits and vegetables, only to return home at the end of the

harvest season. Refugees forced out of their home may intend to return when political,

economic, or environmental conditions (see below) permit, but for many of these forced

migrants, that time never comes. And of course, nomadic people permanently live in

temporary housing that moves with them in a never-ending cycle of residential mobility.

H. Individual Activity Space

One of the realities of life is that groups and countries draw boundaries around

themselves and divide space into territories that are, if necessary, defended. Some see the

concept of territoriality—the emotional attachment to and the defense of home ground—

as a root explanation of much of human action and response. It is true that some

individual and collective activity appears to be governed by territorial defense responses:

the conflict between street groups in claiming and protecting their “turf” (and their fear

for their lives when venturing beyond it) and the sometimes violent rejection by an ethnic

urban neighborhood of any different advancing population group that it considers

threatening. On a more individualized basis, each of us claims as personal space the zone

of privacy and separation from others that our culture or our physical circumstances

require or permit. Anglo Americans strive for greater face-to-face separation in

conversations than do Latin Americans. Personal space on a crowded beach or in a

department store is acceptably more limited than it is in our homes or when we are

studying in a library.

For most of us, our personal sense of territoriality is a tempered one. We regard

our homes and property as defensible private domains but open them to innocent visitors,

known and unknown, or to those on private or official business. Nor do we confine our

activities so exclusively within controlled home territories as street-gang members do

within theirs. Rather, we have a more or less extended home range, an activity space or

area within which we typically move freely on our rounds of regular activity, sharing that

space with others who are also about their daily affairs. Figure 3.10 depicts activity

spaces for a suburban family of five for an average weekday. Note that the activity space

is different for each individual.

The types of trips that individuals make, and thus the extent of their activity

space, depend on at least three interrelated variables: their stage in life course; the means

of mobility at their command; and the demands or opportunities implicit in their daily

activities. The first variable, stage in life, refers to membership in specific age groups.

School-age children usually travel short distances to lower schools and longer distances

to upper-level schools. After-school activities tend to be limited to walking or to bicycle

trips to nearby locations. Greater mobility is characteristic of high-school students.

Adults responsible for household duties make shopping trips and trips related to child

care, as well as journeys away from home for social, cultural, or recreational purposes.

Wage-earning adults usually travel farther from home than other family members.

Elderly people may, through infirmity or interests, have less extensive activity spaces.

The second variable that affects the extent of activity space is mobility, or the

ability to travel. An informal consideration of the cost and effort required to overcome

the friction of distance is implicit. Where incomes are high, automobiles are available,

and the cost of fuel is reckoned as minor in the family budget, mobility may be great and

individual activity space large. In societies or neighborhoods where cars are not a

standard means of conveyance, the daily non-emergency activity space may be limited to

walking, bicycling, or taking infrequent trips on public transportation. Wealthy

suburbanites are far more mobile than are residents of inner-city slums, a circumstance

that affects ability to learn about, seek, or retain work and to have access to medical care,

educational facilities, and social services.

A third factor limiting activity space is the individual assessment of the existence

of possible activities or opportunities. In subsistence economies where the needs of daily

life are satisfied at home, the impetus for journeys away from home is minimal. If there

are no stores, schools, factories, or even roads, expectations and opportunities are limited.

Not only are activities spatially restricted, but awareness space—knowledge of

opportunity locations beyond normal activity space—is minimal, distorted, or absent. In

low-income neighborhoods of modern cities in any country, poverty and isolation limit

the inducements, opportunities, destinations, and necessity of travel (Figure 1.28).

Opportunities plus mobility conditioned by life stage bear heavily on the amount of

spatial interaction in which individuals engage.

I. The Tyranny of Time

Whatever their activity, people are always located somewhere. Furthermore, they

are always located somewhere at some time of the day or night, and they spend various

periods of time at each location before moving through space and time to new locations.

The study of the temporal characteristics of activities in conjunction with their spatial

characteristics is known as time geography. We can depict this by drawing a graph that

shows activity locations and movements around the landscape plotted against time on the

vertical axis. This graph of a person’s activity locations at certain times is a space-time

path. Figure 3.11 shows a daily space-time path, but weekly, yearly, or even lifetime

paths are possible. Whatever the temporal scale, space-time paths are notable for their

tendency to show cyclic, nonrandom patterns of recurring activity locations at particular

times, such as daily or seasonal patterns.

The activities of humans—eating, sleeping, traveling between home and

destination, working, or attending classes—all consume time and involve space. An

individual’s spatial reach is restricted because one cannot be in two different places at the

same moment or engage simultaneously in activities that are spatially separate. Further,

because there is a finite amount of time within a day and each of us is biologically bound

to a daily rhythm of day and night, sleeping and eating, time tyrannically limits the

spatial choices we can make and the activity space that we can command.

The daily space-time constraints of our time geography may be represented by a

space-time prism, the volume of space and length of time within which our activities

must be confined. Its size and shape are determined by our mobility and our locational

responsibilities; its boundaries define what we can or cannot accomplish spatially and

temporally (Figure 3.12). If our circumstances demand that we walk to work or school,

the sides of our prism are steep and the space available for our activities is narrow; steep

diagonals mean slow travel and indicate that we cannot go as far in a given time period.

We cannot use time spent in transit for most other activities, and the area reasonably

accessible to the pedestrian is limited.

The space-time prism for the driver has more shallow-angled sides and the

individual’s spatial range is wide; shallow diagonals mean rapid travel and indicate that

we can go farther in a given time period. The area of the prism determines what spatially

defined activities are possible, for no activity can exceed the bounds of the prism (see the

feature “Space, Time, and Women”). That is, spacetime paths are constrained to fit

within space-time prisms. Because most activities have their own time constraints, the

choices of things you can do and the places in which you can do them are strictly limited.

Scheduled class hours, travel time from residence to campus, and dining hall location and

opening and closing hours, for example, may be the constraints on your space-time path.

If you also need part-time work, your choice of jobs is restricted by their respective

locations and work hours, for the job, too, must fit within your daily space-time prism.

Parenting responsibilities, particularly for single parents, place major constraints on the

spatial range of individuals. In households where one partner (typically the woman) bears

greater responsibilities for childcare and household chores, their job choices may be

limited by their narrow time-geographic constraints, and they may be forced to accept

lower pay and/or a less prestigious job. In other words, all people have space-time

budgets that dictate how far they can travel in a given time period. Geographers apply the

study of these space-time budgets and other aspects of time geography to problems such

as traffic control, mass transit, and highway and parking structure design.

J. Distance and Human Interaction

People make many more short-distance trips than long ones, a statement in human

behavioral terms of the concept of distance decay. If we drew a boundary line around our

activity space, it would be evident that trips to the boundary are taken much less often

than short-distance trips around the home. The tendency is for the frequency of trips to

fall off very rapidly beyond an individual’s critical distance—the distance beyond which

cost, effort, and means strongly influence our willingness to travel. Figure 3.13 illustrates

the point with regard to journeys from the homesite.

Regular movements defining our individual activity space are undertaken for

different purposes and are differently influenced by time and distance considerations. The

kinds of activities that individuals engage in can be classified according to type of trip:

journeys to work, to school, to shop, for recreation, and so on. People in nearly all parts

of the world make these same types of journeys, though the spatially variable

requirements of culture, economy, and personal circumstance dictate their frequency,

duration, and significance to an individual (Figure 3.14). A small child, for example, will

make many trips up and down the block but is inhibited by parental admonitions from

crossing the street. Different but equally effective distance constraints control adult

behavior.

Critical distances, even for the same activity, are somewhat different for each

person. The variables of life stage, mobility, and opportunity, together with an

individual’s interests and demands, help define how often and how far a person will

travel. On the basis of these variables, we can make inferences about the amount of

information that a person is likely to acquire about his or her activity space and the area

beyond. The accumulation of information about the opportunities and rewards of spatial

interaction helps increase and justify movement decisions.

For information flows, however, space has a somewhat different meaning than it

does for the movement of commodities. Communication does not necessarily imply the

time-consuming physical relocations of freight transportation, though in the case of

letters and print media, it usually does. In modern telecommunications, the process of

information flow may be very quick regardless of distance. The result is extensive space-

time compression. A Bell System report tells us that in 1920, putting through a

transcontinental telephone call took 14 minutes and eight operators and cost more than

$15 for a 3-minute call. By 1940, the call completion time was reduced to less than 1½

minutes, and the cost fell to $4. In the 1960s, direct distance dialing allowed a

transcontinental connection in less than 30 seconds, and electronic switching has now

reduced the completion time to little more than that involved in dialing a number and

answering a phone. The extra price of long-distance conversation essentially disappeared

with the advent of voice communication over the Internet early in this century.

The Internet and communication satellites have made worldwide personal and

mass communication almost immediate and data transfers a matter of moments. The

same technologies that have reduced the time separation of communications have tended

to reduce their cost separation. Domestic mail, which once charged a distance-based

postage, is now carried nationwide or across town for the same price. In the modern

world, transferability is no longer a very significant consideration in information flows. A

speculative view of the future suggests that as distance ceases to be much of a

determinant of the cost or speed of communication, the spatial structure of economic and

social decision making may be fundamentally altered. Determinations about where

people live and work, the role of cities and other existing command centers, flows of

domestic and international trade, constraints on human mobility, and even the concepts

and impacts of national boundaries may fundamentally change with new and

unanticipated consequences for patterns of spatial interaction.

Spatially significant information flows are of two types: individual (person-to-

person) exchanges and mass (source-to-area) communication. A further subdivision into

formal and informal interchange recognizes, in the former, the need for an interposed

channel (radio, press, postal service, or telephone, for example) to convey messages.

Informal communication requires no such institutionalized message carrier. Short-range

informal individual communication is as old as humankind itself. Contacts and exchanges

between individuals and within small groups tend to increase as the complexity of social

organization increases, as the size and importance of the population center grow, and as

the range of interests and associations of the communicating person expands. Each

individual develops a personal communication field, the informational counterpart of that

person’s activity space. Its size and shape are defined by the individual’s contacts in

work, recreation, shopping, school, or other regular activities.

Human spatial interaction, as we have seen, is conditioned by a number of factors.

Complementarity, transferability, and intervening opportunities help pattern the

movement of commodities and peoples. Flows between points and over area are

influenced by distance decay and partially explained by gravity and potential models.

Individuals in their daily affairs operate in activity spaces that are partly determined by

stage in life, mobility, and a variety of socioeconomic characteristics. In every instance of

spatial interaction, however, decisions are based on people’s beliefs about the opportunity

or feasibility of movement, exchange, and the satisfaction of needs and desires, not the

objective truth about these things.

More precisely, our actions and decisions are based on our cognition—the

awareness that we have, as individuals, of home and distant places, and the beliefs that

we hold about their properties. Geographers often refer to such cognitions about Earth

locations with the term place perception, which is our beliefs, impressions, and feelings

—rational or irrational, consciously realized or not—about the natural and cultural

characteristics of an area and about its opportunity structure. (Used in this way,

geographers are treating the term perception as synonymous with cognition.) Whether our

views accord with those of others or accurately reflect the “real” world seen in objective

terms is not all that matters. Our cognitions are important because the decisions that we

make about how to spend our time or about what actions to take in space are not based

directly on reality but on our assumptions and impressions of reality.

Psychologists and geographers are interested in determining how we arrive at our

cognitions of place and environment both within and beyond our normal activity space.

The images we form firsthand of our home territory have been in part reviewed in the

discussion of mental maps in Chapter 1. The cognitions we have about more distant

places are less directly derived (Figure 3.19). In technologically advanced societies,

television and radio, magazines and newspapers, Web sites, books and lectures, travel

brochures, and hearsay all combine to help us develop a mental picture of unfamiliar

places and of the interaction opportunities that they may contain. Again, however, the

most effectively transmitted information seems to come from word-of-mouth reports.

These may be in the form of letters or visits from relatives, friends, and associates who

supply information that helps us develop ideas about relatively unknown areas.

Less certain is the negative impact on spatial interaction or relocation decisions of

assessments of natural hazards. Natural hazards are elements, processes, or events in the

environment that can cause harm to humans. Although the term implies that these hazards

are “natural,” human adaptation and location decisions always play a major role in

determining how disastrous the results are. For example, where we decide to build homes

and businesses, and how we construct them, has a major impact on how much destruction

is caused by an earthquake.

When continental glaciers began their retreat some 11,000 years ago, the activity

and awareness spaces of Stone Age humans were limited. As a result of pressures of

numbers, need for food, changes in climate, and other inducements, those spaces were

collectively enlarged to encompass most of the terrestrial world. Migration—the

permanent or planned long-term relocation of residential place—has been one of the

enduring themes of human history. It has contributed to the evolution of separate

cultures, to the diffusion of those cultures and their components by interchange and

communication, and to the frequently complex mix of peoples and cultures found in

different areas of the world. Indeed, it has been a major force in shaping the world as it is

today and continues to be an important force in ongoing world change.

Migration flows can be discussed at different scales, from massive

intercontinental torrents to individual decisions to move to a new house or apartment

within the same metropolitan area. Geographers broadly distinguish total displacement

migrations, wherein migrants travel so far that they have completely new activity spaces

that do not overlap at all with their former home ranges, from partial displacement

migrations, local moves wherein migrants move to a new residence nearby, with new

activity spaces overlapping some with their former home ranges. As discussed more

below, such partial displacement moves are actually quite common, an expression of

distance decay in migration behavior. At each scale, although the underlying controls on

spatial behavior remain constant, the immediate motivating factors influencing the spatial

interaction are typically different, with varying impacts on population patterns and

cultural landscapes.

Migrations may be forced or voluntary or, in many instances, reluctant relocations

imposed on the migrants by circumstances. Put another way, all migrations can be placed

on a continuum of motivation from being strongly forced or compelled to being entirely

voluntary, with all possible degrees of motivation in between. In forced migrations, the

relocation decision is made solely by people other than the migrants themselves (Figure

3.26). An estimated 10 to 12 million Africans were forcibly transferred as slaves to the

Western Hemisphere from the late 16th to early 19th centuries. Half or more were

destined for the Caribbean and most of the remainder for Central and South America,

though nearly a million arrived in the United States. Australia owed its earliest European

settlement to convicts transported after the 1780s to the British penal colony established

in southeastern Australia (New South Wales). More recent involuntary migrants include

millions of Soviet citizens forcibly relocated from countryside to cities and from the

western areas to labor camps in Siberia and the Russian Far East beginning in the late

1920s. During the 1980s and 1990s, many refugee destination countries in Africa,

Europe, and Asia expelled immigrants or encouraged or forced the repatriation of foreign

nationals within their borders.

Economic considerations crystallize most migration decisions, though nomads

fleeing the famine and spreading deserts of the Sahel obviously are impelled by different

economic imperatives than is the executive considering a job transfer to Montreal or the

resident of Appalachia seeking factory employment in the city. Among the aging, affluent

populations of highly developed countries, retirement amenities figure importantly in

beliefs about the residential attractiveness of areas. Educational opportunities, major life

events such as getting married, moving closer to family members, and environmental

attractions or repulsions are but a few other possible migration motivations. Migration

theorists attribute international economic migrations to a series of often overlapping

mechanisms. Differentials in wages and job opportunities between home and destination

countries are perhaps the major driving force in such individual migration decisions.

Those differentials are in part rooted in a built-in demand for workers at the bottom of the

labor hierarchy in more prosperous developed countries whose own workers disdain low-

income, menial jobs with poor wages and benefits. Migrants are available to fill those

jobs, some argue, because advanced economies make industrial investment in developing

or colonial economies to take advantage of lower labor costs there. New factories

inevitably disturb existing economies, employ primarily short-term female workers, and

leave a residue of unemployed males available and prone to migrate in search of

opportunity. If successful, international economic migrants, male or female, help

diversify sources of family income through their remittances from abroad, a form of

household security that in itself helps motivate some international economic migration.

Negative home conditions that impel the decision to migrate are called push

factors. They might include loss of job, lack of professional opportunity, overcrowding or

slum clearance, or a variety of other influences, including poverty, war, violent crime,

and famine. The presumed positive attractions of the migration destination are known as

pull factors. They include all the attractive attributes believed to exist at the new location

— safety and food, perhaps, or job opportunities, better climate, lower taxes, quality

schools, more room, and so forth. Very often, migration is a result of both push and pull

factors. But it is important to recognize that it is the migrant’s beliefs about the areal

pattern of opportunities and want satisfaction that is important here, whether or not those

beliefs are supported by objective reality.

The concept of place utility helps us to understand the decision-making process

that potential voluntary migrants undergo. Place utility is the measure of an individual’s

satisfaction with a given residential location. The decision to migrate is a reflection of the

appraisal—the perception—by the prospective migrant of the current homesite compared

to other sites of which something is known or hoped for. In the evaluation of comparative

place utility, the decision maker considers not only the believed value of the present

location, but also the expected place utility of potential destinations. Seen in this way, we

can understand that all migrations not strictly forced are a combined response to push

factors at the current location relative to the pull factors of potential new residential sites.

Module 2_Week 2_Culture, Spatial Interaction, and Behavior_Human Geography

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